Questions before pulling the trigger and after. :)

[sedrostyle]

So since I won't be able to make it down to you guys till after the holidays and I kind of figured out how to finally blurt out all the information I have gathered about LEDs and what I have dreamed about for the last 6 months or so.
Then came along you guys. btw the store is awesome even tho I haven personally seen it yet.
I like to talk face to face personally and get shown hands on. Part of the reason I'm still in limbo.
I don't know how long you guys have been around but seems to be everyone has good things to say.
So I posted a post and decided to transfer it here to get some technical data ( some what. Don't swamp me )
I don't know if a custom setup is what I want or what I should do. I guess that's later to be decided.
I was going to go with a DIY rapid led setup
48 LEDs I have the Colors and stuff I wanted based of a local guy I know that did his. And a 55 is just two of his fixtures.

Anyways that's for a later date. Here's what I asked.

Still awesome things you guys do. I was thinking of a rapid led build and was going to go with the pwm driver. What drivers do you guys use.

Your setups I take it are fully dimmable?

I'm not sure if it's on this topic but I've read when going to LEDs that you'll need to power down your LEDs to begin with for our corals.

By this I'm guessing your meaning the drivers themselfs for each color max Amps? Like blues and whites run at 1.3 so you'd want to run them to begin with at day .2 ?

Is there no way to DIY something software wise with one of your custom obd setups for my tank or anyone else's tank? If someone had the means of doing so?

Do your setups have a controller at all? I know with their pwm the one I was looking at your can individually ramp Colors. And have sunrise day and set, setup.



I need to come down there and talk to you guys I think and pick your brains doin can get some things straightened out. I want to pull the trigger on a led setup soon



I may be pulling information from ten different dirrections and I am sorry in advance.

I am very eager to learn many of things and haven't sorted out everything completely yet



Also a thanks


YOU don't have to answer the software part of it. I kinda did some looking around and I really do not need to dig my head into programming anything again
I tuned cars for a few years.
Anyway. sorry for bugging. It's better than me spending 4 hours down there I guess.

Another thing don't mind my horrible chat I am doing it from a phone for the time being and I can only see two lines at a time hahah I'll go now
Steven

 

[mojoreef]

Hey Steve welcome to our forum. In reading your post it sounds like you got a pretty full range of questions so let me try to answer them all at once instead of doing a point by point type of reply, then just feel free to ask some more if I missed any.

Ok on LEDs lights themselves. So in looking at any kind of LED setup to put over your tank (from DIY to prebuilt) you need to look for a few things.

1: You are looking for an amount of different colored leds as each light color is basically just a narrow spike, so the more colors you have the more spikes you get across the Spectral range of PAR. Now Par is between 400nm and 700nm in range but for growth the zoox in coral use directly only the range between 400nm and 500nm, so any light above the 500nm mark would be for accessory pigment only. So in laymans terms from violet through the blues to a kind of blue/green.

2: With leds their are a number of different wattages, the most efficient are the 3 watts (or the best bang for the buck), so if you see 1 watt or two watt they just dont have the intensity (ability to drive the photons down into the water) , 5 watts are good but if you use them you will tend to drown out the other colors because they are so much more powerful then the others next to them, 50 or 100 multichip leds will also work but you are limited to whatever color they are as you normally can only run one over your tank.

3. If you look at a single leds it is very small and does not give the kind of power you need to drive light (photons) down into the tank, so good fixtures use optics and you can get them in various degrees. These optics will focus the light and drive it down into the tank based on the degree that the optic is built, again good fixtures will use a variety of optics, normally more more optics in the center of the fixture and then narrow ones to the outside so you dont bleed off to much light intensity.

4. Coverage: ok so no mater how you slice it or optic it the light energy will come from where the lights are located on the fixture, example; if you have a five inch line of leds on a 6 inch fixture (or even a 60 inch fixture) the light will still come from that 5 inch strip. So even if you ran without optics (gives you the widest spread) you will see light two feet away in the tank but the Par reading will be very low. SO what you need to do is to spread out the leds over the surface of the water/tank, this allows you to get a more powerful penetration of light across more of the tank. So when looking for a fixture look to the point source, if you have a fixture of any size the only thing that matters in regards to coverage is how large is that point source. So a fixture that is 3 feet long but only has a point source of 4 inches is the same as a fixture that is 5 inches long and only has a 4 inch strip (if everything else is the same). Hope I didnt muddy that explanation to much, lol so basically the more the source of the light is spread out across the tank the better the coverage and thus the light penetration will be.

5. Pattern, so on a variety of lights you will find many different layouts. Some will have just a ton of leds spread out in kind of a line pattern, some in line patterns but then put together in groups and some that use clusters. In researching I have found that when you just have straight line layouts you tend to see more spotlighting and the individual light colors tend to show more, also you can get what folks term as "Disco Lights" which is when the leds show up on your sub-straight and kind of dance (for lack of a better word). When you cluster the led's we have found that you do not get this effect and you get a better blend of the colors.

6. Controllability: So this one can go to the extremes. Having dimmable drivers so you can control the intensity of the light being put into the tank is almost a must now. You you want a fixture that has this type of control. Now this can be had from the basic Rheostat to complex software that can create multiple simulations such as ramping up and down, to cloudy day to storms, to whatever you want almost (even some party lights for those wild parties, lol) You should put these into two catagories, the first being what has an effect on your corals and those that are cool. In what I have seen and researched I find that the ramp up and ramp down feature is the best feature that the corals can use directly, also the dawn and dusk effect has an impact (nice to see the corals glow to!!), from their you go to lighting strikes, cloud cover, seasonal settings all of which kind of fall into its cool for a while for the user but usually only for a while. Another big one is the dialing in an overall color for the lights that is pleasing to your eyes. So with this if you take away the blue and white leds you are usually left with a very small amount of other colors (red, green, yellow) which unless you run them by themselves will be drowned out by the other blues/whites almost immediately, so they really have virtually no effect on the overall look of the light to our eyes. Thus it comes down to blues and whites, so as long as you can control these two colors on separate channels you can dial in the light from what hobbyist's call 10 k to 20 k.

Sorry for the long winded reply but it should give you an idea on how to compare fixtures. I will get into our light and the reason for it next.

 

[mojoreef]

Ok so the OBD light fixture and why we designed it the way we did. I will do the 6 cluster light, but the same applies for the 4 cluster..just less

1. The 6 cluster light has six clusters of 12 led's each for a total of 72 three watt Led's. Each cluster is in a four inch circle and is spread out over a 16 x 11 inch area to give you a much larger point source entering your tank. The Leds are all 3 watt and have White, Cool White, Blue, Royal blue, Violet and cyan (greenish) led's in them in a ratio we believe gives you a great mix. All the Leds in the fixture are with in the 400nm and 510nm range of par, so all the light is directly usuable (or what some folks term as PUR). We use a couple of different optics, wider in the middle led's for a better blend/spread and narrow on the outer edges of the cluster so that you dont bleed light out of the tank to much.

2 Drivers, Our drivers are built and not a straight off the shelf unit. We designed them to have dimmability in a 0 to 5 volt range (some fixtures are 0-5 and some others are 0 to 10, they both do the same function) but we also designed them to control the fans/cooling of the fixture. We didnt want to have to stuff a transformer in the fixture nor did we want to have a box outside of the fixture that you have to hide somewhere. Since we have so many leds and push so much par/photons down into the tank we decided to tune the drivers down so that even if you cranked the fixture up to max on all channels you are still not running at full power, we did this to preserve the components and add longevity to the light overall.

3.Control; The light comes standard with two channels that are controlled by two Rheostats, this is a basic setup. The reason we did this is because of our overall philosophy that we want to make the hobby a little more affordable but still allow the end user to take it as far as it gets. One channels controls a mix of blues, royal blues, violets and cyans with 24 leds (on the outer edges of the fixture for blend). This channel would be used for dawn and dusk effects and to also dial in how overall blue you want to make the light look (10k to 20K) the second channel consists of the same colors but adds the whites to it and consists of 48 led's. So the power channel to simulate a more natural sunlight.

4: Expanded control: Our lights come with the basics in control, so two Rheostats controlling two channels, but they can be upgraded to be able to be used with a couple of different control units. One is the Apex from Neptune, for a very small fee we can modify the dimmer wiring to allow the light fixture to plug into an Apex controller. From their you would be able to have all the feature Neptune offers for lighting, so ramp up and down, dawn and dusk, seasonal settings and so on. The second upgrade would be to have us modify the wiring and attach it to a Arduino type controller (we use Boost's Typhon) and put it into our custom black acrylic box ( I will post a pic). With this you will be able to do the ramp up and down, dawn and dusk and if you want to expand the control language you can do everything from lightning, to cloud cover to a disco ball for your parties, lol

5. Price; The 6 cluster 72 led light goes for $ 370.00 say compared to your DIY 48 led (with no fixture) that goes for $365.00 or on the other end of the scale a Radion that has only 32 leds (genII) and goes for $ 649.00. Our smaller light fixture has 4 twelve cluster lights for a total of 48 three watt led's (probably more comparable) and goes for around $ 270.00


What we are trying to do here with the lights along with our custom filtration systems and our custom tank building is to make the hobby a little more affordable while still getting a top quality product. This way the customer has a little more money to spend on the things they really like to look at like the fish and corals we put in the tank???


So on a different note on the customizing, this is something we like to do with all of what we build, as in any tank size or shape, skimmers, reactors and sumps built to the size that fits into your cabinet to a lighting system. If a person wants a light fixture but wants a sleeker looking unit, or a unit that is the length of their tank (all one peice) we can do that to. We have a light that is coming out for a couple of customers that contains 2 of our 6 cluster lights, but it is enclosed in a solid black acrylic fixture with a built in controller and has legs that attack to the back of the tank so you can walk up to the tank and simply raise the whole light fixture to work in the tank. Pretty damm good looking to!!! SO anything is possible, we just dont want you to have to start with a fortune and go up from their??


Mike

 

[mojoreef]

Oh and on your question on starting low with intensity and the ramping up as the corals acclimate. So if you take a MH say for instance and it has a par reading of 400 you can say that the amount of par that goes into the tank is all the colors with in par are represented in different levels. Then you take a LED light and get the same 400 par reading they are not the same in terms of effect on the coral. Led's spectral out put is almost all with in the 400 to 500nm range which just happens to be exactly the range that the Zoox (algae with in the coral that turns photon energy into simple sugars) uses directly so it is much more powerful from a corals stand point, so here is what happens.

So picture a Zoox, a round blog of algae (diatom basically) with two antenna. A basic explanation of what goes on is that these zoox absorb light energy (photons) at their antenna and either take it in to be converted into sugars through photosynthesis I or II reactions or burn it off as heat. So one of the bi-products of photosynthesis is Oxygen, so if you bombard the coral to quickly with usable light the production of Oxygen begin to raise. As it raises it can become a type of super radical, similar to ozone or hydrogen preoxide, both of which are not a thing you want with in your tissue!!! The corals defence for this is to release and enzyme that causes the zoox to bail out of the corals tissue, this is why you see folks post sometimes " I dont know what happend but my corals bleached" So this bail out solves the issue of the oxygen increase but then the coral is left with no zoox and thus no source for food and thus it dies.

So in acclimating the lights what you are doing is to allow the coral the chance to adjust the amount of zoox it has in its tissue so that it gets what it wants and doesnt get to much all at once?? Make sense??

Ok I need more coffee now


Mojo

 

[sedrostyle]

Awesome explanations.
It cleared up a lot of the jumbled info I had already.
You guys do awesome stuff. And from the sounds of it I will be contacting you.
Thanks Again and I will have to bring you some finger braces after all that typing.
I'll pm your for some sales questions

Steven.

 

[kpiotrowski]

I can't believe I just read all that.:ranger:

 

[Skimmy]

meeee tooooo.....
but excellent descriptive responses.